Andrew Dillin on CURED, UC Berkeley’s new approach to advance medicine and global health

October 1, 2025

by Alexander Rony

Andrew Dillin is a professor of immunology and molecular medicine in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB). He would be in the Department of Neuroscience, too, if he wasn’t so dang busy.

In addition to his regular teaching and research duties, Dillin is developing the Division of Immunology and Molecular Medicine’s new curriculum while serving as the faculty co-director of the Robinson Life Science, Business, and Entrepreneurship Program. In his spare time, he is forming a new Center for Unmet, Rare and Emerging Diseases (CURED) that will connect efforts across campus to discover cures other organizations are not pursuing.

UC Berkeley writer Alexander Rony spoke with Dillin about the CURED initiative and his many other roles.

Alexander Rony: What do you hope to accomplish through your lab’s research?

Andrew Dillin: Our research is to uncover what makes young people youthful and old people frail. We're in the very early days of figuring out what the rules and classifications are for different forms of aging. Aging is not one-size-fits-all.

The vast majority of my research is looking at cells and simple organisms to see how they age, what's lacking, and why these older cells can't respond to stress like they did when they were young. We've identified molecular players that modulate stress responses, and when we re-tune those pathways in older cells, we can make the cells and animals live longer. It's really exciting, not just for aging research but for disease research as well.

Much of our work focuses on mitochondria, a centerpiece for many neurodegenerative and muscle-wasting diseases. Hopefully, we can uncover how aging contributes to those diseases and how we can fix them — not necessarily to make people live longer, but for specific functional improvements such as preserving muscle or postponing neurodegeneration.

What are some areas of aging research that could have a meaningful impact on people's day-to-day lives in the coming decades?

New discoveries have the potential to dramatically alter our longevity. The biggest medical breakthrough that has changed human lifespans over the last 150 years has been antibiotics. I think the two biggest breakthroughs to come out of aging research in the next 10 years are additional strategies to fight off infections and maintain muscle mass.

Humans are in an endless arms race against infections, and we lose that battle as we age. If we can figure out ways to reprogram that, we will fight off infections later in life as well. Similarly, as we get older, our ability to gain and retain muscle dramatically declines. I think we're going to make discoveries that help us rebuild and maintain muscle mass, which is going to improve so many areas of human health as well.

Can you talk about Leigh's disease and what you found?

Leigh's disease is caused by mutation in the part of the mitochondria that makes energy to power cellular processes. It's a horrible disease: People born with this mutation don't live very long. Fortunately, a group at Harvard discovered that using an antibiotic that mildly inhibits mitochondria greatly improves a mouse model of Leigh's disease. My lab has discovered the mechanism behind the treatment, and we've synthesized new molecules that are much better than the antibiotic. We think our molecules would be exceptional at fighting this disease as well as many other mitochondrial diseases, and we think they would actually fight off muscle wasting too.

Is your discovery going to move towards clinical trials?

If I can get the funding for it, absolutely! That's the only thing that's limiting. The scientific process is there, and we have the molecules, we just need help moving this forward to improve the lives of patients.

Leigh’s disease is quite rare, so pharmaceutical companies are not necessarily interested. Because there are not many patients, the profit margins don't justify them spending millions of dollars to get it to the clinic. It's unfortunate and short-sighted, so we have to find a different route.

What prevents medical schools and research centers from targeting rare diseases, and why is UC Berkeley a good option for this kind of research?

Looking up at the modern facade of a building

The Li Ka Shing Center houses many biomedical labs, including Dillin's.

Berkeley has already proven that we can make massively important medical discoveries.

Andrew Dillin

If a rare disease has a thousand patients in the entire world, the traditional approaches taken by medical or research centers will run into roadblocks. They will struggle to source patient material or enroll enough patients into a clinical trial to provide meaningful insights into the disease.

The other way is what we’re trying to do at the Center for Unmet, Rare, and Emerging Diseases. CURED draws upon the best fundamental research in the country at UC Berkeley, including fields not typically represented at medical schools. We will connect the fundamental discoveries and develop a potential treatment, then we partner with philanthropists, venture capital, and the biotech community here in the Bay Area to develop a company to shepherd new treatments into clinical trials. That company develops a drug, then they organize all the patients and their physicians. We are decentralizing the normal path to clinical breakthrough.

How would the CURED initiative further this research?

The idea behind CURED is that we can take the discovery science that Berkeley is known for, translate that into medical discoveries, and be socially responsible while doing it. We are taking a new approach to health science. We will go after the emerging, rare, and uncommon diseases that few researchers pay attention to, and instead of addressing individual diseases one by one, we are creating new technologies that have broad impacts across many diseases. We think that treatments for these rare and emerging diseases discovered at CURED will have much broader applicability to more common diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, ALS, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s Disease, for example.

The underlying theme is immunology. When we were developing this center, we looked in areas where Berkeley could make the greatest impact. If we can figure out different ways to tweak the immune system, we can go after emerging diseases, rare diseases, cancer, and autoimmune diseases, and we think that a cure for one of these diseases might be a cure for many.

We want to do something that's never been done before; that's why we're so invigorated. We want to go after the things that no one else is going after, and we want to use discovery science to fuel this engine. Berkeley has already proven that we can make massively important medical discoveries. We already have two of the biggest biomedical discoveries of the last hundred years with CRISPR and immune checkpoint inhibition. With this track record, we think we're going to be just as successful with CURED.

How will CURED work with other campus units?

CURED is going after four different disease categories, but we need basic science centers to support us. CURED will rely on emerging technologies being developed, for example, at the Innovative Genomics Institute, the Molecular Therapeutics Initiative, and the Stem Cell Center.

How can philanthropy advance CURED?

There are different levels starting from the top — funding all of CURED — to funding sections of individual projects. CURED doesn't have a name affiliated with it yet. Additionally, each of the four pillars can be funded separately as well. If there's a donor who is very interested in cancer, global health, rare diseases, or autoimmune diseases, they could completely fund the efforts there. We need to fund the scientists who are going to make these big discoveries, so we need funding for graduate students and postdocs. This will ensure the future success of this bold idea.

You're also the faculty co-director for the Robinson Life Science, Business, and Entrepreneurship (LSBE) Program. How is the program going?

We want to go after the things that no one else is going after, and we want to use discovery science to fuel this engine.

Andrew Dillin

Mark Robinson had this vision to build a small, selective program to develop the next generation of leaders in biotech: the CEOs, chief scientific officers, and chief technology officers. We get fantastic researchers, Ph.D. students, doctors, and scientists coming out of this program. They're getting a degree in molecular and cell biology — almost all of them are in immunology and molecular medicine — and a business degree from the Haas School of Business.

We admit 25 of these exceptional students every year. At the end, they break into groups and build a company. They'll take a disease, figure out a treatment, and go through the scientific, clinical, and business aspects needed to see a potential cure developed. Many groups partner with existing biotechs, and afterwards, many are asked to join and continue building their companies.

We just hired David Chan, an M.D. from Stanford, and he is fantastic. He is the Haas faculty co-director. It really is a joint program between MCB and Haas. We're getting more recognition across the country. The word's getting out that these students are exceptional and landing at the top-notch places after graduation.

LSBE is a new way to prepare students for impactful careers in biotech. You also reimagined how we teach immunology. Can you talk about that?

I used to teach Bio 1A, which is introductory biology. It has 800 students a semester. I also taught a big undergraduate genetics class. The students love basic science discoveries, but when you tie those discoveries to human health, something impactful goes off in their head. It made me think about different ways to teach our students.

We are really good at teaching fundamental science, but we weren't as good at translating it into real-world scenarios. I got together with a group in immunology, and we came up with this concept of molecular medicine to teach students basic concepts that are translated into real-world medicine. We have an entire major emphasis on this for molecular and cell biology with lectures and laboratory classes where they do experiments to figure out a disease. We teach the success stories; we also teach the failures. For example, we spend a week talking about why there is no game-changing treatment for Alzheimer's disease. I try to empower the students to tackle these failures, and I think they will be the ones who figure it out in the future.

It's an amazing, uplifting time to teach this. I absolutely love doing it and our classes are oversubscribed. Hopefully, we're creating the next generation of scientists and physicians who are going to translate basic research discoveries into bona fide medicines for some of the toughest diseases.

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